


I'm So Down

by PJVilar



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, First Kiss, First Time, M/M, Outdoor Sex, Reunions, Romance, Young Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 14:27:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2776376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PJVilar/pseuds/PJVilar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brad Colbert is 18 and taking a train cross country to start basic training on Parris Island. He does not expect to fall in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm So Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [buhnebeest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/buhnebeest/gifts).



> The plot is loosely, loosely based on Richard Linklater's films "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset". The title is taken from the song "She Looks So Perfect" by 5 Seconds of Summer. Thank you to my wonderful betas. Happy YAGKYAS, buhnebeest!

Normally you couldn’t pay Brad Colbert to be in Berkeley. Today, though, nothing can keep him out. Not even the recurring thought that this is a cataclysmically bad idea.

He parks his bike outside the sprawling bookstore; it’s called Pegasus. Of course it is. He and pulls off his helmet, scrubbing at his hair for a moment before he catches what he’s doing and drops his hand.

*

_Despite the fact that he’s about to fulfill his lifelong dream of serving his country, Brad is pretty fucking over America right now. New Mexico was beautiful and scattered moments of the landscape have been intriguing but generally it’s a whole lot of the same: trapped in a train car full of recycled air and weird family dynamics. Even the initial allure of nachos and Mountain Dew has gotten old._

_There’s a guy sitting a few seats in front of him with a map spread between his broad hands. It wouldn’t have caught Brad’s attention, except he keeps rotating it around and around, like he can’t figure out which way is up. Amid the shushes of fellow passengers who have had it with the sounds of crinkling paper, the guy stops cold, pops his face over the seat and beams a smile right at Brad._

*

The door has wind chimes that ring gently as he enters the store. The place is a little run down, nothing like his preferred Barnes & Noble, but big and filled enough to be impressive. In the window is a large placard with the book’s cover, a kind of modernist painting of willow trees on a darkened street and the title, the one Brad’s seen everywhere he looks lately: _In Arms_.

There are several people at the staff counter. He’s nearest to a woman in a yellow sweater so he asks her, his voice low, where the reading is.

She winces quickly, like it’s a nervous tic. Then she points toward the back of the store, on the left.

“He just started,” she says. “You hardly missed anything.”

*

_“Oh my God, you really thought I couldn’t figure out which way the map went? That’s hysterical.”_

_They’ve relocated to the dining car, to the extent that it can be called that, Brad and this guy -- floppy haired and sharp as a tack-- so he can spread his map all over the sad plastic counter and shift it around some more as he pencils out various routes he could take across country._

_“There’s no shame in being directionally challenged,” Brad muses, snatching his cup of coffee out of the way as the map starts to move again. “You know, they have apps for this.”_

_“I like knowing how to do things myself,” the guy mutters and brings the eraser end of the pencil to his lips as he ponders which way to go next._

_Brad swallows hard and tries not to stare at his mouth._

*

There are more seats toward the front but Brad doesn’t want to cause a disturbance so he crouches down low and excuses himself past a few other attendees about four rows from the back. When he’s settled in, helmet stowed beneath his metal folding chair, he tunes in to what’s happening in the front.

There he is. Nate Fick.

*

_By 3 o' clock, a time they mutually deem admissible to buy a beer, Brad has gotten to know Nate a little. He’s 18, like Brad, and heading back to Maine after driving cross country with friends. He's starting college in the Fall and spending the rest of the summer after this working at a local hospital . He chose to head back by himself so he could, as he puts it, find his own territory. It’s a little strange, but Brad likes it._

_“So,” Nate says, putting down his can and stretching his arms up over his head. “Straight to Parris Island for boot camp? No stops, no sightseeing?”_

_“Hadn’t really considered it,” Brad says. “But New Orleans is coming up, according to your chicken scratches.”_

_“It’s amazing,” Nate says, shoving into Brad a little for the chicken scratches comment. “And there’s a World War Two Museum. You should totally stop there.”_

_Nate already went there for two days with his friends. So Brad knows how minimal the chances are but he leans into Nate a little, holds his gaze for a moment._

_“Maybe I will, but only if you come with me.”_

*

The things that are the same help Brad recognize what has changed. Nate’s voice is nearly as he remembers it. His sinuous fingers wrapped around the hardback are enough to make Brad startle slightly when he notices them. He’s older, of course, but his body and posture have changed, his face. The nuances are things Brad could never have anticipated, how he’s broader and the shape of his cheekbones is different. He’s older and the college boy isn’t quite there anymore. But the man unequivocally draws him in all the same.

It’s not surprising that he reads beautifully, that he puts on voices and smiles shyly whenever the audience laughs. Every so often he looks up and scans the crowd. Brad doesn’t sink down in his seat but he doesn’t straighten up either. It’s odd. He came here to see for himself. To confirm that all of this was real and not the result of some bad drugs Ray snuck into his Fanta. Now that the moment is here –

Nate is describing the mausoleums of New Orleans’ Garden District when their eyes meet. The smile he holds back practically vibrates through Brad.

He is suddenly sure that this is what Nate was hoping for all along.

*

_They get off the train around four and practically sprint to the museum. Nate takes him straight to the D-day theater and they sit alone, thigh to thigh on wooden crates, watching the Battle of Normandy in historical clips. It’s breathtaking and scary and not at all sexy, but as they sit together, rapt, Brad brushes his thumb against Nate’s. Nate brushes back, hesitantly, then slides his hand beneath Brad’s._

_They have until tomorrow morning, when Brad absolutely must get back on the road. Until then, Brad decides right then, there’s only them._

*

In the question and answer portion, people ask a few questions about New Orleans. They ask a couple of things about the narrative and Nate’s writing process. Eventually a young bearded guy stands up in his row and says:

“The romance is wonderful, I think, because it’s so specific to these two people but it also, I mean, it felt to me like falling in love for the first time feels, with something very real about how that is between two men. Is this based on real life experience, or, what did you draw from?”

Nate pauses for a second. Brad wonders if Nate has a stock answer -- he must get asked this all the time. Maybe he’s reconsidering what to say, in light of Brad’s presence.

But Nate finds him amid the audience again and locks his gaze straight on him as he answers.

“I drew from real love,” he says. “But this narrative is meant as. . . I guess an exploration of how love reframes the self, especially in the context of a gay relationship, like you said. The experience was real, but the book isn’t the experience. It’s that experience explored. I couldn’t, really, stop exploring it.”

*

_Schlepping their backpacks everywhere aside, walking through New Orleans with Nate is easily the best day of Brad’s life. They talk and talk and talk, from the French quarter, past a brass band playing Ice Cube (Nate marvels at it; Brad had no idea) and on to the Garden District. They buy beignets and later, muffalettas, at Brad’s insistence, and even to a boy raised on Jewish deli they are pretty exceptional. They debate everything: the art of the sandwich, war narratives in literature, the ineffectuality of Congress, the best guitar player in rock music._

_By 11 p.m. they’re walking along Bourbon, hurricanes in hand. Brad shakes his head at the ridiculousness of it, the tourism of it, and he doesn’t even mind._

_Nate pulls him to a street corner, a sea of people pushing along beside them. He puts his oversized glass down right on the street beside them, and pulls Brad down by the collar of his t-shirt. They kiss like that for the first time, under lamplight, both their backpacks still on._

*

Brad hangs back when the reading is over and people are having their books signed. There’s a sizeable history section and this place is eclectic enough that the technology books are probably interesting but he doesn’t want to wander too far from the signing table.

He catches Nate’s eye a few more times, each time with some awkward smile between them that startles Brad with the buzz of electricity it shoots through him.

*

_They buy a couple of beers and walk to a small park. Throwing his backpack down is practically delicious and it occurs to Brad that Nate must feel the same. He rubs the knots from his shoulders, Nate sitting sprawled between his legs right in the grass. Nate leans against him, back to chest, cotton-warm and sweet and Brad lets his hands keep moving. In two days he’ll have his head shaved, boots issued, his life stripped away and begun again. He still wants that. But he wants Nate. So much._

_In the early morning, after two rounds of sex and endless kissing, they hop the fence together into one of New Orleans’ famous mausoleums. They take turns reading the names out loud off the stones. They leave their packs by one plot and wander around until the sun is well and truly up._

_Brad kisses him, among the grand old dead of New Orleans. He pulls back but Nate's face is so beautiful, imploring him without words, so Brad kisses him again. He keeps kissing him, attempting to wrest time into stillness, until he can’t avoid the road ahead anymore._

*

Nate caps his pen and runs his hands down the cover of his book once, pats it lightly and then rises from his chair. He’s in front of Brad in a hot second, too quickly, almost.

“Brad Colbert,” he says, perusing Brad’s face, a mere hand span away from touching.

“Reframes the self? Really?” Brad says through a grin that, though he would never admit it, is full of a sort of relief, finally being here, Nate right in the same room as him.

“I think,” Nate says, “you missed the pertinent part of that exchange.”

“That must be because I’m so impertinent,” Brad says.

“That you are,” Nate says, and steps forward slightly into Brad’s space.  Brad finds himself reaching for Nate’s hand without even thinking about it.

“Hi,” he says.

*

**_The air was not the sultry Southern damp I’d come to expect from too many readings of Faulkner. It was cool and light around our bodies, as pleasing as everything I could feel on my skin and in my heart. His hands skimmed down my chest, along my arms. I gripped his thighs and his ass, tried to press him into me, but I needn’t have tried so hard. The willows that limned the little park seemed overgrown but that was the state of them, lush and dripping almost to the earth. There in the midnight grass, held safe by those trees and in his arms, we joined effortlessly, as our pleasure joined with love. The impression of him, strong and tentative and so maddeningly alive, held fast to me, that night and every night that has followed._ **

**_\--Excerpt from “In Arms,” by Nathaniel C. Fick_ **

***


End file.
